The World's Largest Experiment in Human Behavior

How men like slender women endowed with gigantic penises, and women like reading about rugged men having sex with other men.

Homo sapiens' sexual predilections have always been tough to nail down. Most people don't make merry love in shopping malls and public squares. We are loathe to share our intimate desires with neighbors or scientists. Our brains recoil in disgust or ignite in anger when confronted with sexual ideas different from our own. Alfred Kinsey was the first and only scientist to systematically document the sexual interests of a large sample of Homo sapiens--and rarely has a scientist encountered such hostility and outrage. More than enough social outrage to prevent any subsequent researcher from extending his survey.

As a result, it hasn't been possible to "see what's on the end of everyone's fork," to steal an expression from William Burroughs. What do men and women truly like? Scientists just haven't been able to get accurate data.

Until now.

For the first time in human history, we have access to millions of fragments of an unprecedented new landscape of data documenting humankind's private interests. Each one of us now has the ability to instantly request ANY kind of erotica imaginable by making a wish to the genie of a million squicks: the internet.

As the internet has matured and evolved, it has become an ever-growing cross-cultural repository of all of our fantasies and a reflection of our aggregate psyche. By examining the content, frequency, and distribution of these fantasies we can obtain a clear picture of what men and women really like.

In our research, we have done exactly that. We analyzed a billion web searches, a million Web sites, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, millions of personal ads, millions of online dating responses, millions of paid subscriptions to adult sites, tens of thousands of comments on erotic sites, tens of thousands of digitized romance novels, and much more.

We now know, for example, that men seek out penises almost as often as they seek out vaginas. We know that women virtually never pay for online porn. We know that men search for overweight women three times as often as they search for underweight women. We know that women around the world enjoy romantic and erotic stories about two men. We know that virtually all of clinical psychology's ideas about the prevalence of various fetishes (paraphilias in the literature) are completely and embarrassingly wrong.

In other words, we can finally see what's on the end of everyone's fork. And uncovering what we really like is the first, essential step in explaining why.

How did you account for biases in available content, in other words, online porn not being evenly distributed, balanced mix of content?
For example, you cite that men search for "over weight women" more often than "under weight women", in order for that to mean anything, you obviously must have taken into account that commercial porn focuses much much more often on skinny, if not exceptionally under weight women, which therefor don't need to be searched for.

Mu,
That's a good point. To compare the popularity distribution of searches and available content we also analyzed the content of the top million websites and categorized all the erotic websites on that list.
Websites devoted to women of "healthy" weight (healthy as defined by the Center for Disease Control) are easily the most popular. We computed the Body-Mass-Index for adult actresses and found these to be much closer to the healthy range of BMI.
While there are many more websites featuring women in the normal BMI range, the number of websites featuring overweight women is far higher than the number of websites featuring underweight women.
In other words, the peak is, as you would expect, at a healthy BMI, but the distribution curve tapers off asymmetrically, with a much fatter tail for large BMIs. Basically, the search distribution mirrors the distribution profile of the content.

All this is explored in greater detail in the book.

As for the idea that people only look for fringe content, this is an assumption we went in with but the data proved us wrong. We are all prone to assuming our own behavior to be the norm.

The objections are either valid or they're not, even if you don't like the source. Calling the sources "shrill feminist blogs" is not a scientific-based defense of the material in this "experiment".

Notice that Drs. Ogas and Gaddam have not answered that comment or any similar one, despite the fact that this has been up for over a week now.

Why?

Because their work is indefensible and they know it. Calling it a "pop science" book would only be half-right. It's a moneymaker, pure and simple, designed to sell people comfortably established stereotypes updated with 21st century buzzwords and a plausible veneer of sciencey-sounding proof to back them up.

There's a reason Ogas isn't publishing this schlock in a peer-reviewed journal. When review comes to him anyway, he runs and hides.

I'd be interested to know if they had some context for the large breasted scantily clad woman serving tea in the image introducing this post that made it seem like a natural part of the plot, or she's showing up just for fan service. Can someone give a pointer to the comic that's being cited there?